PHP introduced a handy built-in web server that makes it much simpler to test applications quickly and locally than having to have a full Apache+PHP install sitting on you machine. In this new post to the VG Tech blog, they take it one step further. They suggest that you can use it for testing too.

As of PHP-5.4.0 the CLI SAPI provides a built-in web server. The web server is designed for development purposes, and serves requests sequentially. This web server can come in really handy when the need for an httpd arises during (integration) tests. In this post I'll use PHPUnit as the testing framework, and I'll show you how to start the web server during the bootstrap process, and how to shut it down when the test suite is finished.

His example shows the creation of a basic phpunit.xml configuration file, but the bootstrap is a little different than some you've seen. With the help of a few constants and a command-line call to start the web server, he gets things up and running and ready for testing. A shutdown command is also included as a registered shutdown function to clean up after the testing is done.